whalesalad

iLovePhotos Private Beta

Posted 3 months ago at 9:53 pm. 10 comments

I forgot to tell all of you here on the interweb, but iLovePhotos is sort-of kind-of in the private beta phase.

Pretty cool right? Sort of. We have quite a ways to go, but we’re making good and steady progress. Oliver Beattie was added to the team a few short months ago in April, and has truly been an amazing person to work alongside. He gave our web team the major boost it needed and has helped us in many more ways than any one person on our team might know. He’s the guy responsible for the redesign of our previously tired and lonely Blue Lava website. Sadly, Beatle Mc Beatle Beattie is leaving us on Tuesday and heading back to the rock over the pond, and then a big continent, and then another pond, England. Cheers Beattie! See you in a few weeks :)

We’re doing some pretty cool shit at Blue Lava. Facial detection, photo organization, visual tagging. Thankfully we’re not re-creating a text editor in a web browser. We’re actually building a pretty exciting — please, gods of the interweb, do not smite me for saying this next word — platform. A platform for sharing your photos literally automatically, while still giving you the tight control that you might want over those pictures your EyeFi camera accidentally automatically uploaded from that crazy night with your girlfriend in Mexico. Or maybe… it wasn’t your girlfriend and it should have been, hah.

But really, photo websites right now are total shit. Even Kindfish, a site that I initially designed and worked on, is total shit. Flickr is great as an online photo storage system, and I love Flickr, but in general the tools that most of this world are using (eg. Kodak Easy Share) are total crap.

We’ve got two new interns in town, David “dkock” Keck who has been here for a little over a week, and Dustin Bachrach who just landed this evening from San Antonio, Texas. Yeehaw! Dkock (he chose to be called this, so don’t look at me, I just work here) is pretty fucking rad actually. I really had no expectations, but coming into the office is a lot more fun now-a-days. Dustin just landed and is probably far into a nice deep sleep right now due to the time difference, but I am sure tomorrow is gonna be a pretty fun day.

HammerHead is really the heart and soul of iLovePhotos. It’s a desktop application which helps you organize your photos based upon the people in them. This makes it easy to recall those photos later because you’ll always remember who it was who stripped down to their bare ass and streaked through the mall. Or at least you’ll remember their bare ass, and you can easily create visual tags of bare asses in HammerHead, we built that functionality right into the core.

So things are fairly exciting. Stressful, yet exciting at the same time. Expect to hear more from me on the iLovePhotos front in the next few days/weeks. Meanwhile check out the website and throw your name into the hat for a beta invite. Comment here and I might just give you a few. If you’re lucky.